It is Time
Many residents of Island House, Westview, and Rivercross came here, to a Roosevelt Island that New York State had made barely livable, to create a new community, on the strength of a New York State promise that they would, one day in a distant future, be the full-rights owners of their apartments.
In the years since, they have succeeded in their part of the deal, creating a wonderful community on the strength of the minds and hearts they brought to the task. But also, in the years since, they have seen the State offer incredible sweetheart deals to deep-pockets developers who have grown wealthy on the State’s near giveaway of extraordinarily valuable land where apartments now rent and sell at embarrassingly high prices. They have given the State of New York pained forbearance while bunglers have come here to manage their community badly – given the task simply because they were someone’s buddy, political hanger-on, or partner in something slightly less than honorable.
Now, that distant future has arrived, and under the law, those pioneer residents are entitled to treatment equal to that given to tenants and resident owners in other Mitchell-Lama buildings across the City and State.
But the Spitzer administration is saying, "No, wait longer... the promise didn’t really count here. Wait into perpetuity for what you were promised."
It is time for that to stop. It’s time, now, for New York State to keep its promises to those who created community here. It is, quite simply, time for New York State to honor the deal it made so many years ago, and let Rivercross go private without restrictions, and let the tenants of Westview and Island House strike the best deal they can with the buildings’ owners, and collect their reward of full-rights homeownership.
It’s called equal treatment under the law.
And it is time.